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The politics-administration dichotomy has been one of the most disputed theories of public administration. Despite serious critiques, neither the theoretical utility nor the normative power of the dichotomy has totally disappeared over the past decades. The dichotomy has been advocated on the grounds that the dichotomous division of labor and authority between elected and administrative officials increases the democratic accountability and planning ability of public administrators. This article first builds a theoretical model of the politics-administration dichotomy and then evaluates the model using empirical data collected from a nationwide sample of city managers serving in council-manager local governments. Results of structural equation modeling illustrate that the politics-administration dichotomy fails to obtain its predicted tendencies in actuality. The authors interpret the findings in light of the contemporary public administration literature. The article aims to make a theoretical-empirical contribution to one of the most challenging questions in public administration.
The politics-administration relationship has been an important question in public administration since its inception as an acknowledged discipline in the late 1880s. More than a century of debates notwithstanding, the question remains engaging and challenging to scholars and practitioners. The question of how to position public administration in relation to politics bears important implications for both the intellectual identity and institutional development of public administration (e.g., Goodsell 1983; Guy 2003; Henry 1975; Overeem and Rutgers 2003; Rutgers 1997; Svara 1999; Van Riper 1983; Waldo 1990; Whicker, Olshfski, and Strickland 1993).
One of the earliest responses to the question came from Woodrow Wilson in his seminal article "The Study of Administration" (1887). The article has frequently been referred to as the inception of public administration as a field of study separate from politics and political science. With contributions from numerous scholars in the following years, Wilson's rudimentary ideas have evolved into a theory of public administration known as the politics-administration dichotomy. The dichotomy is premised on the idea that public administration is somehow distinct from politics, and there is a hierarchical (superior-subordinate) relationship between the two. As construed by the dichotomy, politics is about policy making, a set of activities that involve explicit value choices. On the other hand, public administration is an instrument used for translating formulated policies into concrete results through the application of specialized knowledge...